Five Questions on Virtual Coaching: Mary Louise Hemmeter
Jennifer Boss: Hi, I'm Jennifer Boss, and welcome to "5 Questions on Virtual Coaching."
Mary Louise Hemmeter: I'm Mary Louise Hemmeter, and I'm on faculty at Vanderbilt University and work with DTL on coaching.
Jennifer: So, what are the key considerations for coaches and coachees to keep in mind for effective virtual coaching?
Mary Louise: One of the things, I think, is that we have to remember that you still have to do coaching the way it was designed. And so, that means that relationships are important, that means that you have to have a plan, that means that you have to have a way to absorb, that you have a good way to do reflection and feedback, but it also means you have to be flexible, especially in this virtual world. And so, what does that mean to be flexible when it comes to coaching? Well, I think that means that we have to be really intentional about picking effective practices to focus on that are relevant to the virtual setting. So, if a home visitor is working with a parent, and that child is at home alone – I mean, at home without other kids around, it probably doesn't make sense to work on teaching friendship skills, but it might be important to work on structuring routines and helping children learn about their daily routines. So, we got to really think about effective practices that are relevant. I think we have to adjust our goals. I think we have to make sure that the goals that we're choosing are things that the coach or the teacher or the home visitor wants to work on. And I think more than ever, in the virtual setting, that we really need to think about, how are people going to feel successful? Because I think right now it's hard to feel really successful. And so, we might want to pick goals that are going to help people feel successful more quickly. And then the last thing I want to just mention is that I think we have to be transparent in coaching virtually about things that might be stressful to teachers or home visitors. So, if we're going to be videotaping, that could be stressful, right? So, let's just be transparent about why we're videotaping. We're going to videotape so that the coach or the home visitor or the teacher can review the video. And we're not going to be videotaping to give that video to some supervisor. So, I think if we're just transparent about it, about what we're going to do with the video, that we can help people feel more comfortable.
Jennifer: So, how do coaches build, maintain, and strengthen relationships with coachees in a virtual space?
Mary Louise: That seems like the kind of million-dollar question, I think, in a lot of ways. And I think that there's lots of strategies we can use that are not really all that different than what we would do in a live space, but I think some things might become more important. So, I think we want to be sure that in our – that in our coaching sessions, that we're building in time for casual conversation, that we're checking in with the teacher or the home visitor or whoever we're coaching about things that we know are important to them. So, we might be checking in with them about their new puppy dog, or we might be checking in with them about how their kids are doing. But we're saving some time and giving some time to just checking in with them. I think we want to celebrate. We want to celebrate little wins because little wins virtually might feel like big wins, and that might be coaching successes. It might be personal successes, but we want to be sure we're celebrating those successes. I think we want to give coachees time to get used to the technology. And so, I think that the whole technology thing may feel really uncomfortable to some coachees, and I think we have to kind of build in opportunities for people to practice the technology without the pressure of reflection and feedback. So, we probably don't want to have the first time we are going to watch a video be about coaching, right? So, maybe we just have a visit where we say, "We're going to figure out how to upload videos." "Here, I'm going to upload a video of myself and let's look at it." And then, "What if you brought a video of your child or something? And let's upload it, and let's just talk about the process of uploading and watching videos."
Jennifer: So, what should coaches be observing when they're working with teachers or home visitors for supporting virtual learning at home, and what are some of the strategies that they can use during virtual observations?
Mary Louise: I think we have to maybe reframe a little bit what we think about observations and what can count as an observation. I think the first thing that we want to always remember is that whatever we're doing related to observation is based on the action plan, and that, again, just creates this safe space. But I think we can think outside the box of what it means to observe. So, it might mean we observe a teacher doing a lesson with a group of kids on their virtual platform, or it might mean that we observe a home visitor doing a home visit on the virtual platform. But it might also mean that we're not necessarily looking at the teacher, but we're saying to the teacher, "We're going to watch to see if children are engaged, and we're going to kind of prompt you for the kids who aren't engaged," because it's too hard to be doing this virtual learning and looking at a picture of 10 kids and figuring out what kids are engaged. So, we can take a little bit of pressure off by saying we're going to look at the children, or we're going to look at the family, versus looking at the teacher or the home visitor.
Jennifer: So, what are some strategies coaches can use for providing constructive feedback to teachers and home visitors during virtual coaching sessions?
Mary Louise: One, is that I would say we should be really intentional about grounding our feedback in what we hear the coachees saying. So, we might think a session went really well, and when we ask the home visitor, they might say, "I thought that was a disaster." So, how do we ground our feedback and our reflection in that, in the perception of the coachee versus kind of putting our own feelings on that? I think one way to help people feel more comfortable is to focus our feedback on the children or on the families, meaning whoever the coachee – so if the home visitor is working with the family or the teacher's working with kids – that we're focusing on the family and children and how they're responding and how they're understanding what goes on. That takes a little bit of pressure off the teacher or the home visitor, and it says, "OK, so, this child looked like they weren't so engaged. What could we do to support that child?" Feels a little less pressure. I think we want to avoid any kind of feedback about technology because we're all struggling with technology, and we just need to be helpful in that way. I really want people to be sensitive to the limitations imposed on teachers and home visitors and be sure we're not giving them feedback about things they can't control. I think there's a couple of strategies we can use that might not initially sound like feedback but serve to be feedback. So, I think asking teachers, asking home visitors if you can share their successes with other teachers and home visitors is a way of saying, "What you're doing is really great." And I think, given this context of all of us kind of learning as we go, saying to a coachee, "You know, I might want to ask some of my other coaches how they're handling that, how their teachers are handling that, or how their home visitors are handling that." And that just, again, says we're all learning that we're all trying to get better at doing this and that none of us have all the answers.
Jennifer: What are some words of encouragement that you want to share with coaches, with teaching staff and home visitors and parents who are all working together in this virtual space?
Mary Louise: People have been doing research on virtual coaching for a long time, but people haven't been doing research on virtual coaching to coach people to teach virtually, right? And so, what that makes me think is that we're just all learning. We're all learning, we're all going to make mistakes. I think we have to assume good intentions in the work that we're doing. I think we have to assume that we're all struggling, that we're all trying to do the best we can, that we're all trying to juggle kids and animals and jobs and houses and partners and all of those kind of things, and that we just have to assume everybody's doing the best they can under these situations. And then I just want to close by saying that I think we're tempted to want to be fancy during this time, to think about fancy ways to have backgrounds behind us or having a Bitmoji classroom or whatever, but the people we're supporting don't care about fancy. They want connections, and they want support, and I think we know how to make connections, we know how to support people, and fancy is nice, but being connected, being supportive, even in the absence of fancy backgrounds is going to make us more successful. [Music]
What are some important considerations for coaches to keep in mind when providing coaching to education staff in virtual settings? In this video, Dr. Mary Louise Hemmeter, professor at Vanderbilt University, answers five questions about virtual coaching.
